Sax Axis by Josh Gaines

“Sax Axis” by Josh Gaines, published in The Poeming Pigeon: Poems about Music, released November 12, 2016 by The Poetry Box.

Sax Axis

Corner of
rooftop and jazz,
top of sound waves
the sweet of fresh baked,
earth of waking coffee pots
alarms foot tapping symbol crash
smack clack and flail,
the floor already
warming with vibration.

Deciding what makes
the world go round,
in the building where music lives,
everyone who wants to be
anyone worth remembering
chats up old timers
for trade secrets:
How he held the thing wrong
Even then wouldn’t touch the stuff
Covered his lips in Carmex
They pile on the how in the hell mystique,
Never owned a clock in his life and
never late for a gig.
Dizzy woke to imagination,
a reveille of Do-Be-Dat!
squeaking through his ears
like Beethoven’s brass
deaf to the sounds
of the day.

Today’s movement
plays off traffic horns’ jam,
trash can steel’s crashing battle,
the muted-piano pigeon coos
on a roof
with the band
who plays the sunrise
to the drowned by endless incandescence
halogen fluorescence
star sparse sky,
the hopes of immigrant shoulders
the promises of free flow
on a breeze of asphalt
and cherry blossoms.

A blackbird remains antenna perched
before a cloudless summer.
Before a trumpet no longer on a march,
time saunters.

By night, time and trombones slide
with bands’ howling midnight saxes,
a nightly practice of
feet pressing earth to music’s entrancing.
The world spins on its axis
because we keep dancing.